The 6 Luckiest Near-Death Experiences Ever Caught on Camera

#3. Dancing Dipshit, Meet Giant Lightning Bolt

As a comedian, I am torn. I know that I should rabidly mock the shirtless man in this video, flexing beside his parked car in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm. This is my job as a humorist, after all: to humiliate the idiotic in order to inform and dissuade, thus ensuring the survival of the species. It is literally the most noble of all possible professions. I should be happy to do it.

But I just can't. I feel too bad for the poor bastard. Listen to the audio at the start: He doesn't even want to be out there. His girlfriend wants a funny video, so she orders him out into the black-metal-worthy storm. She heartlessly demands that he strike a pose in the middle of a natural disaster, so he does. But when he attempts to come inside, she goes Girl Hitler on him and ferociously points further out into the maelstrom. He complies without question.

It ends almost exactly how you'd expect:

Jesus. That's not just any lightning bolt -- it whites out the entire block when it strikes. It looks like Judgment Day from the Terminator movies. The video abruptly cuts out just seconds after the bolt lands, so there's really no telling how this turned out, but I'm going to venture a guess and say that when the camera panned back up, Thor was standing in the middle of the street flicking his wrist and making a "whipped" noise at Big Shirtless Ron up there.

#2. Man Front-Flips Out of Disintegrating Truck

Uh-oh.

Barren landscape, fish-tone color palette, dash cam.

Yep. This is Russia.

And that means somebody's about to hold themselves an impromptu automotive Thunderdome.

One would assume, by virtue of the dash-cam car tailgating the holy shit out of that Russian White Slavery Truck (it's their version of the Child Molester Van), that the driver is going to be the one exploding out of his windshield in a few seconds. But then, much like the Spanish Inquisition ...

... it's the unexpected that gets you. The truck in front of the dash-cam car takes a sharp left, the truck in the opposite lane chooses the same moment to selfishly continue straight along as he was going, and surprise!

It's like a Russian jack-in-the-box. One minute everything's fine, then all of a sudden a bunch of exploding metal pops up and now there's a guy named Vadim standing in the street just wondering where his coat went.

No, seriously, look closely at that video:

The driver of the oncoming used-to-be-a-truck landed on his feet, but somehow got knocked out of his own fucking coat! We've already seen sandals fly off. Sure, understandable: They're like shoes for people who are afraid of commitment. Hats? Yeah, a strong wind (or a Polish bullet) will do that. But I have never seen somebody get hit so hard that they fly out of their own coat, and then walk away unscathed. I don't speak Russian, but I'm pretty sure "Vadim" is their word for "Unbreakable."

#1. Special Skilled Counterpoint: You Can Surf an Avalanche?

If you've grown bored with people pratfalling through the Reaper's fingers, let's see where dense balls and sharp reflexes get you. This is a video of a snowmobile driver surfing an avalanche. I am not being hyperbolic:

That still is taken from about 38 seconds in, when he turns to look back and the whole world just cracks open beneath him. That's the point where I would reverently whisper "I've always loved you, beer," and then die quietly inside of a mountain. Not this guy, though: He doesn't freeze up for a second. He instantly yanks the handlebars, turns around, and guns it down the avalanche, even as the ground beneath him suddenly loses surface tension. About 41 seconds in, he jumps the literal shockwave of snow rippling toward him and races the slide down the rest of the mountain.

Hands up if you didn't even know avalanches had friggin' waves, much less the proper technique to "surf" them. The driver isn't even really shaken up by the experience. Whereas some of us would speak solely in screams and pooping sounds for the next six months, the very next words out of his mouth are a jovial laugh and "got a hell of a video."

Admittedly, it's not much of a catchphrase, but I'm not going to sit here and tell Dirk Hardpack: Avalanche Surfer what to say as he humiliates a natural disaster.